Michael MuchmoreTwitterFon 1.5 (for iPhone)TwitterFon is a good-looking, capable Twitter client for the iPhone, but its free version lacks features you'll find in the competition, such as multiple accounts and themes.

Color-codes new tweets. Automatically uses short links for image URLs.

Cons

Not as easy to get to trends and local tweets as in Twitterrific. No text compression. Doesn't support multiple accounts.

Bottom Line

TwitterFon is a good-looking, capable Twitter client for the iPhone, but its free version lacks features you'll find in the competition, such as multiple accounts and themes.

TwitterFon for the iPhone does nearly everything that Twitterrific does: Both let you see nearby tweets, include location info in your tweets, and search for terms and users. But although the basic version of TwitterFon is free, you have to pay ($4.99) for some things that come free with Twitterific, such as themes and multiple accounts. Paying for the Pro version also gets you shake-to-refresh and landscape keyboard view, abilities I think should also be in the free version if TwitterFon really wants to compete.

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TwitterFon only lets you use multiple accounts in the Pro version. Both Twitterrific and TweetDeck for iPhone give you multiple accounts for free. Some may prefer the one-account limit, because it means the app starts up right in your feed, rather than first requiring you to choose a source. I also like how TwitterFon highlights new tweets in light bluea stronger indication than Twitterrific's subtle orange timestamps. TwitterFon also makes it easier to Favorite posts, right from the feed page.

Icons at the bottom of the page let you easily see only replies to your posts, direct messages, or favorites, and search. This last is where you can choose to view nearby tweets and trending topics, as well as search for users. The searching interface takes a little getting used to, since it tries to serve so many purposessometimes it isn't clear whether you're searching for a user or a topic. I also think the results it gives aren't particularly useful. When I did a user search for "Tom," for example, I got just one result. Surely there are more IDs containing that name, and the search isn't too useful if you have to type the exact username.

TwitterFon's Web page claims the app has a conversation view, but this was hard to find and didn't work in the free version. Twitterific's conversation view, by comparison, is easy to find and worked as expected.

Tweeting

Creating and sending a tweet in TwitterFon is pretty similar to doing so in TweetDeck and Twitterrific. None of them lets you use the keyboard in landscape mode (in the free version), but they do let you include your location and a photo. In TwitterFon, adding location just means adding latitude and longitude to your profile; Twitterrific can include a link to a Google Map. There's no text compression like that of Twitterrific, though I found that to be of limited use, anyhow.

Like Twitterriffic, TwitterFon has the useful capability of letting you tweet a URL from Safari using a bookmarklet. This is far more convenient than typing a long URL. TweetDeck for iPhone lacks this feature, which is a real shortcoming.

When using TwitterFon, you're stuck with its light blue scheme unless you spring for the Pro version; Twitterrific's free version is more customizable, with three theme choices. And to change any settings in TwitterFon, even your user account, you have to go to its separate iPhone settings entry.

Tweeps will find TwitterFon a perfectly capable client with a mostly usable interface. I'm not sure why the TwitterFon Pro version costs a dollar more than Twitterrific's Premium versionsurely the shake-to-refresh gimmick isn't worth a dollar. If TwitterFon moved all its cool features into the free version, and reserved only ad-free tweeting for the paid version, it would go a long way to narrowing the gap with Twitteriffic, my current favorite iPhone Twitter app.

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About the Author

Michael Muchmore is PC Magazine's lead analyst for software and web applications. A native New Yorker, he has at various times headed up PC Magazine's coverage of Web development, enterprise software, and display technologies. Michael cowrote one of the first overviews of web services for a general audience. Before that he worked on PC Magazine's S... See Full Bio

TwitterFon 1.5 (for iPhone)

TwitterFon 1.5 (for iPhone)

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